Three Dice Facts

Well this has been a pretty big week. Wednesday’s alignment comic went a little crazy and a lot of new eyes have been here checking out d20Monkey. If this is your first time here, thanks for dropping by and I sincerely hope you dig the archives. You’ll see things progress over the years (I like to think for the better) up to the comics you see this week. I’m always interested in what folks have to say, so feel free to drop me a line anytime.

You want the 20 side up. When it rolls, heavier side is more often down, so if you keep it with the 20 down it’ll stay down more. 20 up, man!

Honestly, what I need to keep keeping in mind when getting/choosing which to use, is readability. I have some awesome dice, but they’re nigh unreadable from on the table (the Drow dice from WotC at GenCon a couple years ago are really bad about this. The blue ones from them from last year are better, but still not great).

Main “ritual”? You never touch someone else’s dice without asking permission. Never. You’ll lose a hand.

That’s the big one right there, touching another player’s dice is tantamount to touching their genitalia. Never ever ever without permission! We also have a standing rule at the table to never let me (the GM) touch any male’s dice, because it kills their ability to roll crits. Female dice are the direct opposite.

Sigh. I accidentally picked up the wrong die with a new group several years ago — I had not been raised in this particular superstition — and it turned into a *walking* trip (because, of course, I was the only one with a car) to a new gaming store to buy new dice. Apparently I killed the luck in the guy’s d20 with the mere act of touching it. O.O

I’d be a lot more skeptical if I hadn’t SEEN him go from rolling at least a couple of 20s every session (usually more like four or five), and almost NEVER anything below a 10, to nothing higher than about a 7 for an hour straight, complete with THREE natural 1s. It was absolutely uncanny.

I fielded quite a few requests to give the GM’s dice the same treatment, including from his girlfriend, but it seems you must have to believe in the superstition to be affected by it. 😛

Dice for a man need to be chosen by a woman, not necessarily your significant other, to work properly. Women can chose their own dice. This has been tried and tested over fifteen years of roleplaying with gamers of both genders. Sexual orientation doesn’t seem to be a factor in this.

Have one die that’s different from the others. It will roll extra well, especially if it’s really ugly.

My fellow players are not of one mind if dice need to be warmed up by a few random rolls before gaming or if that uses up all the good rolls. I’m in the second camp, myself.

I don’t need to mention that no-one ever should touch your dice, do I? It might be possible to transfer some luck from a players who’s lucky with dice to yours by touch, though.

There are dice who will roll always high when a low number is required. Know your dice.

I seriously know a LOT of people who will put them dice highest number up before and during a game. We call that calibrating the dice.

I do that because I’m a little OCD, and I like each die to be “labeled” by its highest value. Also in descending order, in a nice little row in front of me.

We played a white-wolf game a long time ago, and had 4 dice sets for it. I got shorted in one of the sets, only receiving 9 dice, rather than 10. But I’ll be damned if those 9 didn’t roll 10’s three times as often as anything else.

My friends and I tend to pool dice a lot; when I rub my own dice on the leg of my jeans after they’ve been handled by the others, they work better. I liken it to using denim to clean the eraser of a pencil. ^_^

I also set the dice 1 side down, so the “weight settles” to the bottom. I avoid touching someone else’s dice (unless they’re on the floor in my vicinity and it would be rude to not recover them), but I don’t regard it as bad luck if someone else uses mine, although I regard it as a moderate faux pas. I don’t have particular dice rituals, but I’ve noticed I have “DM Dice”– they tend to roll cruelly high when I DM, laying out critical hit after critical hit, and rolling high damage, but once I’m a PC they can barely land a hit.

So my friends and I used to have a pair of d6’s that we referred to as “The Eyes of the Serpent.” No matter what, they would always, ALWAYS roll the exact opposite of what you needed them to roll. The “Eyes” came out of an old copy of Risk. We assumed that years of angry play (seriously, have you ever seen a happy game of Risk?) had charged them with pure spite.

We actually kept them in my freezer to isolate them from the other dice and to keep the evil from leaking out.

. . . specifically, with the red ones. The white ones would probably be decent for BESM, and not even great for that, since they roll just about all 2s. The red ones, on the other hand, have given me some absolutely lovely character spreads over the years. They were the very first dice I ever used for "real" gaming (which is to say, to play an RPG) back in 1997, and they have very, very rarely failed me.

On the subject of angry Risk games, though, it's been my experience that the red dice do seem to consistently roll higher than the white ones in every copy of Risk I've ever played. I always assumed that it was, whether intentional or not on the part of the manufacturers, a malformation in the dice to make aggressors win more often and therefore make it harder to hold continents. This, of course, results in longer games since no one ever gets the army bonus for having a continent (except maybe Australia) until they're really winning. 😛

On the other hand, maybe it is just a lot of karmic frustration built up around that game. I will be sure to pass that theory on to my husband; he'll probably cackle gleefully.

One of my DMs was also a Warhammer player, so he had tons of minis, battlefields, and all that other fun stuff. One thing he had, was this big tower he had converted into a dice roller. I had him for two encounters seasons.

The first season, all the other players at the table hated the die tower. They got a couple of low rolls in the beginning and were all convinced that it was going to fail them and never used it. Second season, the exact opposite. A couple of high rolls in the beginning and they were completely convinced that it would never fail.

Don’t even bother shaking, just let the dice drop from your hand a safe distance above the table that they bounce a bit, but don’t fly off the table. It just feels less random/reliant on luck. Plus, pair it with a ‘Eff it.’ and stone-cold poker face, makes you look like a complete B.A.

as a general rule i have a few loaner dice that are completely unpredictable thanks to the number of players who have used them. However my core set are hands off or… well Huttj put it succinctly already…

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve loaned out sets plenty of times when folks were short, and I had my stuffed full dragon dice bag of dice (now up to 1.5 bags, plus a side hand-crochet’d bag for my L5R D10s in Wasp Clan colors).

Let’s see… the only thing I really have is that dice are to be shaken twice, then rolled out of the palm onto the table. Not shaken like one is making a mojito. Not flung across the table. knocking over the dwarf’s miniature, and off the floor. One need not use the same force required to swing a greataxe to roll for its damage.

I have different sets that are used for different purposes: the clear dice with black letters are the most reasonable, the yellow dice with “doh!” instead of ones are used to try and counter my one friend’s insane nega-luck, my set of five “normal” d6s roll well only in stat generation. Then there are the green dice. Oh, the green dice. I use them only as a DM or when shit is about to hit the fan, and I always keep them with their highest side up. These dice have a taste for blood, and they demand that it be satisfied. I disregard expanded crit range on weapons when I use these dice because I roll twenties so often the extra multiplier is always better. Clinch saving throws, ultimate attacks, anything balls-to-the-wall, and they perform. Rest of the time? A little lackluster, nothing huge, but a bit disappointing. Behind the screen? There’s a reason the party archivist kept Revenance+Revivify prepared at all times as a free rez combo. Fear them.

I find that the more gregarious and sharing I am with my dice, the better they roll, and also that the less readable they are, the worse they roll for me. Also, every single one of my dice seems to have a sense of humor about when to botch and when to crit. I have more humorous failures and horrible successes than I particularly like to think about.

I have a friend who I no longer allow to roll bare-handed in my games. He has to use a cup to roll his dice, so that he’ll get the occasional roll below fifteen. I might just buy him a digital random number generator for his next birthday.

Or for my next birthday. I don’t like having to change the “difficulty” one of my players is facing in order to prevent his characters from being the only ones who actually get to do anything.

I have a “fuck off bag”. If a d20 fails me too often, it goes in the bag until the start of the next session. I recently had to buy another load of d20s… I ran out of them after the second round of combat.

I have a special, blue “Playa-Slaya” d20 that I pull out for the big encounters. Kind of like the old Billy Baroo putter Judge Smails uses in Caddyshack. I’ve never modded it in any way – it’s a stock, plain blue d20 from the D&D 4e starter set. It rolls 20s like a mother fucker. I pulled it out the other day when I was just fucking around at my desk, and I rolled 4 20s in 10 rolls. It’s possessed, man. It drinks players tears!

What do you expect? It comes from the unspeakable edition. The edition whose name and number shan’t be sayed. You’ll want to go and see a GM that is your better and confess your naming of the unspeakable edition to her/him.

Well… sometimes I roll my dice untill they show the lowest number and don’t tuch them afterward untill I need them… probabillity tells us that it’s less likely for dice to roll the same number twice in a row, doesn’t it?

My room-mate has two dice sets; a purple and a green. The green, consistently, rolls < 5. We averaged 20 rolls and it came out to about 7 or 8. His purple d20 normally rolls high, and out of 20 rolls he got 3 nat 20's, and averaged about 15. It's moderately entertaining when he starts alternating dice. Fumble one round, crit the next, rinse, repeat.

My partner once threatened to throw dice into the Baltic Sea while gaming on a holiday. They behaved after that until he was home again. He then threw them out of the window and got new ones.

I don’t remember where I picked the story up, but I read about a guy who had abysmal dice. He bought new ones and set the old ones up on a fence, then proceeded to shoot them down with a BB gun – while the new dice were forced to watch.

New reader. Just stumbled on the alignment page and then binge-read the entire archive. So far I’m impressed, it’s one of the best gaming related comics I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) keep up the good work

My fiance’ and I have only one ritual. Every new character gets his own set of dice. When we roll up, we head to the game store to pick out a new set.
Someday, I plan to mount and frame particularly epic character sheets, and incorporate the dice into the frame. I’ll also put the mini used for that character there as well. I think it’s a really great plan, it just means that right now we have a whole tackle-box full of dice.

Ok, so I just looked at the store for the first time. And I see a sign that you’re moving from Tennessee to Colorado. Has this happened yet? If not, and you’re still in Nashville, I’d definitely like to swing by and shake your hand.

The d10s that came with my Basic D&D set always roll well for me . . . I think it’s appreciation for our mutual loyalty!

I use my “special” math when rolling. For example, if I want to roll a 12 on 2d6, rolling them both from one hand means I have a 1/6 chance of rolling a six on each of them. 1/6×1/6=1/32. But if I roll one from each hand, 1/6+1/6=1/3! Against all reason but my own, it seems to work!

Borrowed dice always roll better. My own dice always screw me so I sometimes “forget” them. Another one is if you are sucking, delay action and roll at the same time as someone else who is rolling better- try to steal (or share if you are nice) their mojo.

I only roll with my d20’s from Magic the Gathering fat packs. My “for DnD dice” have let me down too much, I got about 7 d20 from the fat packs so far, and they usually roll 15 and up, with the odd misfire that I can forgive them for. Thanks to my dice and their good rolls I have pulled off things on characters that would make others jealous.

I actually keep all of my dice in a box i was given last christmas. This box is a 70 year old cuban cigar box, and was used exclusively by an ancestor. Since i’ve been doing that, my dice have been rolling more randomly, closer to the mathematical chances of getting any particular number. Before hand they’d go easy mode on the players, then just screw them out of nowhere. Now it makes the players a bit jumpy whenever i roll, because they can’t predict it as well.

One die owned by one of my players – a hideous red d10 with neon green spots – is known as the Were-Die. One does not ask questions about what other forms it has and when it changes. That is punishable by dying under a flaming rock. The Were-Die will always roll 8s and 9s, but as soon as you use it in an important roll, it will only roll 4s and 5s – that is, just below the oWoD default success margin. If the Were-Die succeeds on a roll, that is because that roll was not important – even if it was to jump between two buildings in a hell of a hurry. Conversely, if the Were-Die fails on a roll, even one to browbeat a random gangbanger for nothing but the player’s own amusement, that roll must have been of critical importance.

I do the opposite. I consider it a bad omen to have low numbers lying face-up, so rather than jinxing myself, I roll the dice until I get a 10, then leave them there. That convinces me that the luck is still in the dice, and that it hasn’t run out.

One of my favorite reactions to a die consistently failing came from Wil Wheaton in one of the Penny Arcade games. I don’t know what he rolled but he suddenly glares down at the table, picks up the die, and then flings it into the audience.

Oh man, the 40k players from around here have so many. Buy your own dice? They’re unlucky. Are the dice not from the same set? Unlucky. Is the set complete? Unlucky. Did you “lose” one of the dice on purpose, to make it not a complete set? Unlucky.

For dice ritual, I just pick up my dice and hold it loose in my hand, visualize the roll I want and then let it go. I rarely roll badly with that and cause of the way I roll it, there’s no way to claim I cheat or manipulate the die.
Cause seriously, the whole point of using a die is to trust in luck and chance, to simulate the factor of randomness. Using techniques to “distribute the weight” and crap kills that and you’d be better off using a D20 that only has above 15’s or just don’t roll and say “I win” instead.